LONDON: Heaven Looks Like Us Book Launch, 29 October

Heaven Looks Like Us is a love letter to Palestinian ancestors, their descendants, and their land, to all anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles, to a history that will never be forgotten, and to a future in which there thrives a free, free Palestine.

Join us at Ibraaz on Wednesday, October 29, for the UK launch of this landmark anthology of Palestinian poetry where will be joined by the collection’s co-editor, George Abraham and contributors  Zena Agha and Sarona Abuaker.

The book is a battle-cry against the annihilation of a people. As Palestinian history remains haunted by exile, violence, and grief, so, too, are the poems in this anthology. And yet, editors George Abraham and Noor Hindi present these realities alongside other themes that are also true: queer and feminist perspectives, eco-poetry, meditations on love and time, and lineages of protest. This anthology dares to imagine a future beyond a nation-state for Palestinian people everywhere.

Tickets are free with advance registration.

LONDON: Isabella Hammad & Mirza Waheed on Palestine & Kashmir, 1 November

Join Isabella Hammad and Mirza Waheed for a unique discussion about Palestine, Kashmir and the parallels and divergences in their modern struggles with colonialism.

They will discuss art and consciousness around the dual ruptures of 1948, reportage and narration of historical insurgency and their own roles as artists working from within the imperial core.

Presented as part of the 2025 London Literature Festival.

Palestine Cinema Days Around the World, 2 November

What’s funny about life under occupation? Palestine Comedy Club is a rollercoaster road-movie that follows six Palestinian stand-up comedians from Haifa, Ramallah, Jenin, Hebron and the Golan Heights who devise and tour a stand-up comedy show exploring the unlikely, often dark humour that circles the complex question of Palestinian identity.

There is no tradition of regular comedy clubs in Palestine and communities are divided by walls, fences and checkpoints that create major disparities in culture and quality of life between one town and another. As such, developing a comedy show that can speak to these very different audiences is almost impossible and the comedians face many challenges in earning comic license and connecting with their fellow Palestinians across the divides.

Despite the cultural and security challenges of touring six Palestinian comedians - all with different travel permissions - across checkpoints and borders to six theatres in Palestine and Israel, audiences flock to the shows and the tour gains momentum through increasing public demand. Word spreads internationally and they are invited to London for a series of gigs starting, tragically, on October 7th, 2023. Just as war breaks out at home, the comedians prepare to perform in English for the first time to an increasingly conflicted British public. Suddenly, the mission to connect with audiences with thoughtful humanity becomes an existential imperative. 

Palestine Comedy Club is a quest to find joy in the tragedy of Palestinian life, and create connection against the odds through a common love of laughter.

Check out upcoming screenings in the UK and across Europe here.

New York: crying out we make a noise we do not recognize: a symposium of/on palestinian performance, 16 November

What is a Palestinian performance in this moment of genocide, catastrophe, the world clinging to its fundamental qualities as we are annihilated? What does it do? Who does it reach? Who, sorrowfully, closes their eyes and ears and heart to its hatred, its grief, its stubborn insistence on survival? How does it circulate, make anything possible, get eaten and metabolized by the vultures of a counterrevolutionary art world? Why do we do it?

These are questions with no answers, questions which instead we devote the entirety of our lives to asking. Towards those questions, this event gathers Palestinian performance artists across medium, genre, place, and practice for an afternoon and evening of performance, research, and performance-research. Curated by Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, featuring work by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Mette Loulou von Kohl, Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, and Muyassar Yousef Kurdi.

This event will take place at the Center for Performance Research on Sunday, November 16. Tickets are available on a sliding scale. Find more details and reserve your tickets here.

Book of the Week

In this moving and generous memoir, Tareq Baconi refuses to separate the story of sexual identity from the story of political commitment, and in so doing models a way to see our personal struggles as intertwined with our collective ones. Fire in Every Direction is a beautiful account of one man's confrontation with the histories, silences, and desires—both communal and private—that have made him who he is.

– Isabella Hammad

From the renowned Palestinian scholar, a memoir of political and queer awakening, of impossible love amidst generations of displacement, and what it means to return home.

Both a love story and a coming-of-age tale that spans countries and continents, Fire in Every Direction balances humor and loss, nostalgia and hope, as it takes us from the Middle East to London, and from 1948 to the present. Tareq Baconi crafts a deeply intimate, unforgettable portrait of how a political consciousness—desire and resistance—is passed down through generations.

In 1948, Tareq’s grandmother, Eva, would flee Haifa as Zionist militias seized the city. In the late 1970s, she would flee Beirut with her daughter, Rima, as the country was in the throes of a civil war. In Amman, the family would eventually obtain the comfort of middle-class life—still, a young Tareq would feel trapped: by cultures of silence, by a sense of not belonging, by his own growing awareness that he is in love with his childhood best friend, Ramzi.

After relocating to London for college, Tareq hopes to put aside his past, and begins to work through an understanding of self as a queer man. Yet as the Iraq War radicalizes young people around the world towards anti-war protest, history comes back to him: hushed whispers overheard, stories of his mother’s years as an activist in Beirut and her return to Palestine during a moment of calm.

Living between the region and London, Tareq fits in neither and feels alienated from both. Queerness is policed back in Amman, just as his Palestinian-ness is abroad. These gradual estrangements escalate, forcing him to grapple with what it means to live in liminal spaces, and rethink the meaning of home. Eventually, tracing the journey of his family before him, Tareq returns to Palestine.

This is an account of finding oneself through histories of dispossession and reclaiming what has been silenced.

Fire in Every Direction publishes next week in the US, and in February in the UK. You can preorder your copy from our Bookshop (US / UK).

Media Roundup

The Burden of Imprecision: On the Limitation of Statistics – Nicki Kattoura weighs the ramifications of statistical thinking about the death toll in Gaza, which serves to disappear the missing and dead into the uncertainty of official figures. 

How My Grandmother Remembers the Nakba – In this excerpt from his new memoir Fire in Every Direction, Tareq Baconi describes how the Amman of his childhood was refracted through his grandmother’s memories of Haifa before and during the Nakba.

Breakthroughs and Breakdowns – Ussama Makdisi reviews Mohammed El-Kurd’s Perfect Victims alongside Peter Beinart’s Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza to examine the imbrication of the settler supremacist logics in Israel, Europe, and North America.

What ‘Day After’ for Gaza? – Examining the current reconstruction plans for Gaza against decades of Israeli-led plans to govern Gaza, Sara Roy shows that the international community operates from the premise that Palestinians do not have the right to determine their own future.

The Time Beneath the Concrete – In Conversation with Nasser Abourahme – Naji Safadi interviews Nasser Abourahme about his book The Time Beneath the Concrete: Palestine between Camp and Colony, about the emergence of the book and the stakes of thinking about Palestine from the perspective of the refugee camp.  

Planning Against Palestine – Alberto Toscano writes about the Trump administration's Gaza ceasefire plan as following a genocidal logic of displacement and accumulation.

The Fate of the ‘Fallen’ – Khalil Abu Darwish, Mostafa Hosny, and Omar Moussa report on Hamas’ executions of people purportedly affiliated with the occupation, drawing attention to the ways in which the Israeli military seeks to exacerbate tensions among rival groups in the Strip in order to divide and control. 

Palestine, Not Zion – A new poem by Su Hwang: “Let us beseech for the swift collapse of gruesome ideologies / & demagogues; no empire needs to endure beyond the decree / of honeybees. From the river to the sea, the sky to every / hive—the earth pollinates loss just as much as it does love.”

AI for War: Big Tech Empowering Israel’s Crimes and Occupation – Marwa Fatafta examines the role that technology giants in the US have played in the surveillance, disciplining, and destruction of Gaza.  

Why Palestinian Prisoners Must Be at the Centre of Solidarity Efforts – Zoé Paris argues that although Israel’s incarceration and torture of Palestinians is central to its settler colonial project, global solidarity with Palestinian prisoners is weak. 

From Camp David to Genocide: Shifts in Economic Cooperation Between Egypt and Israel – In this essay translated by Noha AbuShammala, Hassan al Barbari examines the change and continuity undergirding Egypt’s economic normalization with the state of Israel. 

The Making of a Coal Boycott – Andreas Malm and Maxy Guedes report on the campaign in Colombia to break the relationship between the country’s mining industry and Israeli arms manufacturing. 

Gaza Two Weeks into the "Ceasefire": Continued Killings, Aid Restrictions, Famine – Ryan Grim and Sharif Abdel Kouddous speak to Eyad Amawi of the Gaza Relief Committee about the latest developments on the ground in Gaza, including Israel’s daily violations of the ceasefire agreement. 

“My Fear Is That This Is a Repackaging of the Genocide” – On this episode of Makdisi Street, the brothers speak to lawyer and former negotiator Diana Buttu about the so-called “peace plan” for Gaza, its antecedents, and its possible outcomes. 

“Yet Famine Was Still Famine”: On the Struggle to Find Food and Clean Water in Gaza – In this excerpt from Gaza: The Story of A Genocide, Noor Alyacoubi describes the conditions of deprivation and starvation that plagued her as she tried to breastfeed her baby amid the genocide.

From Saga Hamdan’s ‘Red Light’– In this excerpt from the short story ‘Maryam’, translated by Sheila Casado Ramírez, the narrator reflects on loving someone who has been abducted into the Israeli carceral system: “We will find a way to embrace, inevitably. Why shouldn’t I send you messages? Or have they blockaded the words, too?”

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